How will the success of Facebook’s Platform strategy be measured? That’s a good question. One place to start is traffic numbers. Susan Mernit predicts we’ll see a big lift for Facebook in August’s ComScore numbers. If Alexa is any indication, it’s already happening:

There’s been a 33% increase in page views in the last 3 weeks alone:

Facebook’s Reach has also increased 20% in that same time period:

Wow.

[tags]facebook,traffic,alexa[/tags]

The last couple of weeks have shown the unprecedented power of Facebook as a software distribution platform. Within days, many application providers have their creations in the hands of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of users. RockYou is one application company that has succeeded in achieving rapid viral growth in use of its apps, with Horoscopes’ 1.3 million users and Slideshows’ 500,000 users. We sat down with RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda to get his thoughts on gaining viral distribution through the Facebook platform.

IF: Several of RockYou’s apps are extremely popular on Facebook. What do you think makes a Facebook app successful?

LT: Facebook has created the most viral platform in the history of computing. In the first week, the popular apps were similar to what you would find in other major social networks: music, slideshows, video… and horoscopes! There were also a few native apps like X Me and Extended Info which enhanced core Facebook functionality. By the end of the week, the growth rates started to decline on most major apps.

In the second week, Flixster uncovered the viral loop around invite requests. This channel was so viral that any app using invites grew much more rapidly than other apps. The top five growing apps all had friend invite requests as a part of their install flow. By the end of the week, even Facebook was using invites for their own Video app. Long term, I believe that the Facebook has created an operating system for social media and we’ll see successful applications in all shapes and forms.

IF: How did RockYou’s apps’ growth on Facebook start?

LT: There was a small level of seeding through Facebook’s applications directory but for the next week, it was all viral growth around the mini-feed. An interesting case study was the X Me app which grew to over 200,000 users in a few days without even being listed on the Facebook directory. Even a single person could start a viral chain leading to the acquisition of hundreds of thousands of users. In total, we acquired over a million users in the first week.

IF: How are RockYou’s Facebook apps going to change going forward?

LT: We are looking at even deeper integrations into the Facebook platform but as always, we reserve the majority of our development resources to make the changes that our users ask for.

IF: What are your wishes for how the Facebook platform could be improved?

LT: First would be a solution for auto-playing Flash content that would preserve the Facebook experience. Many of our users are requesting that our slideshows auto-play when someone visits their page as they do in most other social networks. We’ve heard that there may be an opt-in solution for auto-play on the horizon so we’re hopeful. Second would be profile access to FQL (Facebook’s database query language). That would allow for more dynamic content updates on your profile page. Third would be another viral channel to explore… you can never have enough of them! :-)

[tags]rockyou, horoscopes, slideshows, facebook, app, viral, growth[/tags]

Facebook has just updated the design of their home page. Now it’s a bit less minimalist…

[tags]facebook, home page, design[/tags]

People have speculated that Facebook may have shot themselves in the foot by allowing third-party developers to create virtually any kind of application to run inside their site. While most agree that the platform is a good move in the long-term, we now have some short-term evidence to the contrary, in an app that literally takes money from Facebook.

Facebook has been in the virtual gift-giving business for a while. A “Gifts” app comes standard with every Facebook profile, and allows users to purchase little icons to send to friends, whether public or private. These picture gifts cost $1. Facebook donates a certain portion of each gift to charity, but undoubtedly makes a profit on pixels nonetheless.

But, with the advent of the app platform, Zachary Allia saw an opportunity to recreate this same functionality without the (he thought) high price tag, and so he developed Free Gifts, an app which mirrors Facebook’s Gifts in almost every respect – except it’s free. In an informal interview with InsideFacebook.com, we asked him why he thought Free Gifts needed to be made, and the answer was simple: “I just didn’t like the idea of paying for those images. They do have some good looking ones, but I wasn’t ready to fork over money for them.”

Apparently, the much-touted icon design of Susan Kare is not worth it for over 717,000 other Facebook users either! Free Gifts has been radically successful, despite not yet having even made it into the official Facebook directory. Allia’s nonchalant about that latter fact, and thinks that it will be included sometime this weekend, and will moreover bump his user base to over a million.

With 717,000 users, some will be disgruntled – and indeed some have complained about the quality of the images as compared to the standard Facebook ones, or the fact that in not buying Facebook-sanctioned gifts, users are not donating any money to charity. But, in the end, it’s hard to complain about someone offering a free service.

And that’s what might be worrying Facebook execs about this source of revenue which comes directly from users. As far as we can tell, however, Allia’s application is not controverting Facebook’s TOS, and he himself is sanguine about competition in general: “I didn’t think [Facebook] would mind, because it…doesn’t steal users from them.” I suppose that’s really the question – would a user who otherwise would have paid a $1 for a gift use Free Gifts instead? Or is Free Gifts being used mainly by people who would never have paid for a gift in the first place?

In the longer term, it will be interesting to see if the Facebook platform effectively blocks Facebook from rolling out other apps like Gifts that generate income, since, for the time being, it seems that almost anything Facebook can do, an app developer can do for free.

[tags]facebook,app,apps,applications,gifts,free-gifts[/tags]

So, you’ve got a great new facebook app, and you’re salivating at the prospect of unchecked viral growth? Well, who isn’t. Here’s a few tips on how to get as much traction as possible with your new app (in no particular order):

1. Spend time on your icons and screenshots – This is the first interaction your potential users will have with your app, so it had better be impressive, especially if you have competitor apps already out in the wild. There are three pieces to worry about: an application icon (16 x 16 pixels), an application logo (75 x 75 pixels) and a screenshot of any size you choose (which will be resized to the width of your About page). Make sure you have all of these ready to go before taking your app live. In particular, the screenshot should be a picture of your application in action, not just the logo again. You want your users to see the coolness they will accrue by adding your app–not an opaque logo which could hide an ugly app.

2. Spend time on your app’s copy - Users don’t read much, so you have to be smart in how you describe your app wherever it is advertised. You have the most space in your about page, but you’ll still want to be concise. Focus on how your app is different (better) than other ones, and point out the benefits of using it with exciting (but not over-hyped) language. More important is the copy which will be used in the various directories you’ll submit your app to. You have about 250 characters to wow the audience and win converts, so make your phrases tight and punchy. To be consistent, you can use this same text whenever you advertise your app, or share it with friends on Facebook.

3. Submit your app to the directories – There are two important directories to submit your app to. The most important is, of course, the official Facebook directory (found in your Developer app). To submit your app to this directory, it will need 5 users, though, so you may not be able to do it immediately. Also, be warned that it has been taking multiple days (my apps still haven’t shown up after 5) for apps to appear in the directory. There is also the unofficial New Apps directory, which is currently tracking about 100 apps, most of which haven’t made it into the official directory, with an increasing number of apps added every day. Submit your app here to gain some exposure with the early adopter types–and convince your friends to come vote for you there, so you can show up in the Top 10.

4. Time your release – be aware of the usage patterns of the social networks into which you’ll first be releasing your app (i.e., your friends’ Facebook-using habits). If you want your app to gain traction quickly, make sure people add it while their friends are online and browsing around with nothing better to do than add apps. The sooner you can break into new social circles, the better off your app is.

5. Communicate with users – set up a “Feature Request” thread and a “Bugs” thread in your app’s About page, and visit it often (though you’ll be doing that anyway to see how many users you’re getting). Squash any bugs your users point out immediately, and err on the side of over-posting in response on the forums. Users are more likely to use your product if it looks like you’re actively developing it and adding features. If users have specific problems, it’s appropriate to message them individually and let them know the problem has been resolved, or that you’re working on it. In a social network, the only way you’ll gain traction is via the recommendations of your current users to their friends, so make sure you generate a lot of goodwill.

6. Track your growth – from day 0, set a specific time each day to record the number of users your app has. As your app grows, this will be telling data. You can set up a spreadsheet with a few columns: Date, Time, and Current Users. Then you can create some formula columns that, for each row, give you information like how many new users you had today, and your rate of growth as compared with yesterday’s.

7. Get all of your friends to adopt your app – Don’t be heavy-handed about it, but send tactful messages to your friends, even ones you don’t normally talk to. It’s cool that you’re making an app for Facebook, and some might add it just because you’re their friend. Try and convince them to use Facebook’s “Share” feature to let their friends see the app. See who the biggest social butterfly in your friends list is, and focus on him or her.

8. Submit your app to InsideFacebook.com - in addition to general internet marketing for your blog, let us know about it. We profile a lot of apps, and are more likely to profile yours if you send us a descriptive e-mail–thankfully, if you’ve followed the above steps, you’ve already got some great copy and screenshots to send us!

9. Hang out in #facebook on freenode – If you’re an IRC chatter, hang out with other Facebook devs in #facebook. This is a good place to make connections, and to find devs who might be willing to test your app, and give you feedback. Even if you’re still in the idea stages, it’s a good idea to visit, since these devs have a handle on what apps are being developed already, and you may find your app idea has already been coded. It’s also cool to let others know when your app is released, as long as you contribute generally to the room as well. These folks know a lot about app usability issues, code issues, and what’s going on in terms of real-life Facebook dev gatherings.

10. Don’t be evil – It’s sad and frustrating when you release an app only to find that a similar one made it into the directory just a day before you, and now has thousands of users, while yours languishes at a mere 42. The temptation is there to hop onto that app’s About page and start a thread explaining how your app is better, how the other app’s devs are copycats, and all the rest. But don’t do this–it just leaves a sour taste in the mouth of any potential users who read it. Let your app’s merits speak for themselves through use. If a competing app has better features, add them to your app with some modifications, or think creatively about what’s lacking in your competitor’s app, and hurry to implement and advertise those. In general, don’t resort to lame advertising tactics. It will come back around as bad press sooner or later.

Well, there it is. I hope these are helpful tips for releasing your next killer Facebook app. I have found them to work well while developing and marketing my three apps. And remember, with a social network the size of Facebook, there’s room for all of us! Also, if you have any tips or tricks that I didn’t mention, please feel free to add them in the comments!
[tags]facebook,apps,development,how-to,release,app,facebook-app[/tags]

There’s a lot of confusion on Facebook currently around the new Trakzor Facebook app. Many people know Trakzor as the popular MySpace profile tracker, so it’s understandable why many people are finding the Trakzor Facebook app confusing.

Basically, Trakzor is not a true Facebook profile tracker. In order to be tracked as a vistor on someone’s profile page, you have to login to their “Trakzor page,” which means you have to have a Trakzor account as well. Check out what a Facebook customer support representative wrote in a discussion forum on the Trakzor application page:

Trakzor was not created by Facebook. Here are a few important things to know:

- Applications CANNOT track profile visits for users who simply go to another person’s profile; Facebook has made this technically impossible.

- In order to be tracked by this application, you need to click on a Trakzor link in another user’s profile, login to Trakzor, and agree to be tracked. If you do not do this, the other user will not know that you viewed their profile.

- Adding this application is purely optional. If you do not want to participate, please do not add the application to your account.

Well, that should clear everything up. While profile tracking is an extremely popular feature on MySpace, it’s not coming to Facebook anytime soon. I think that’s a good thing for the sense of privacy that exists within the Facebook user community.

Update: Trakzor must be getting a lot of privacy complaints. They’ve added this message to the top of the Trakzor Facebook application page:

YOU WILL NOT BE TRACKED EVERYWHERE YOU GO, WHETHER YOU HAVE TRAKZOR OR NOT. AND YOU WILL NOT BE TRACKED AUTOMATICALLY ON FACEBOOK PROFILES THAT HAVE TRAKZOR. BEFORE YOU DECLARE TRAKZOR A VIOLATION OF PRIVACY, PLEASE READ HOW IT ACTUALLY WORKS.

[tags]trakzor,facebook,profile,tracker,stalker,stalking,privacy[/tags]

If you haven’t heard the story of iLike, it’s one that would make any entrepreneur or investor starry eyed: 1.7 million users two weeks after launch, adding almost 150,000 news users every day, scrambling to find more colo space just to keep the doors open. A relatively new entrant in the crowded music discovery market has suddenly become a force to be reckoned with. How?

iLike is the first great Facebook Platform success story, and perhaps the first company built on the back of Facebook. Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, shared his thoughts with InsideFacebook on the Facebook Platform, why iLike decided to bet on it, and how iLike has been so successful so quickly.

IF: iLike has quickly become the most popular Facebook application, with over 1.7 million users. Why do you think it’s grown so quickly?

AP: Three reasons: 1) Pent up demand. Music was a missing element on Facebook for years, a vaccum waiting to be filled. 2) iLike on Facebook is not just a widget, but a full website deeply integrated into the fabric of Facebook, with a rich breadth of personalized features and over a million artist profiles, songs, and events. 3) We’re innovating to stay ahead — for example, we recently took things to a new level by adding music video search from Youtube for any song.

IF: How did iLike’s growth on Facebook start?

AP: Some of the other most popular apps (like RockYou) have spent money advertising on Facebook or promoting their app via existing mailing lists. In contrast, iLike’s growth has been completely organic. We attended the “F8″ launch event and stayed till the Platform was officially turned on at midnight. Our developers had been pulling all-nighters to complete the product, and went to bed exhausted. We woke up the next morning to find that iLike was the #1 app and was growing like mad, all by itself… 1,000 signups/hr in the morning, then 3,000 signups/hr in the afternoon, then 5,000 signups/hr by evening and just accelerating. Since then it has mostly been a race to buy more servers fast enough! Now we’re seeing 1 million signups/week with no sign of slowing down.

IF: How important is the Facebook platform to iLike’s overall success?

AP: A month ago, we made a big bet on the Facebook platform, and it has already paid off. Now we’re going all in. The question we’re debating now is, “Should FB Platform be the most important thing we focus on, or the *only* thing we focus on?” What we’ve realized is that we can offer the consumer a better experience on our Facebook app than on our own website. That’s a big deal, and hard to accept at first, but once you realize it, the rest of the strategy writes itself. Thanks to Facebook, iLike is now one of the fastest-growing music services in the world. The stakes are huge: iLike is on track to penetrate the entire Facebook userbase and become the dominant Facebook music app. If we succeed, thanks to Facebook, iLike would have a shot at becoming the world’s #1 music service.

IF: How is iLike’s Facebook app going to change going forward?

AP: We are building iLike on Facebook into the ultimate social music discovery service. What you see today is just the beginning. We’re adding features for artists to manage their profiles, upgrade from 30-sec samples to full-song streams, and message their fans. We’ll also be integrating with our iLike “Sidebar” for iTunes — so within Facebook you could share your entire iTunes library and browse your friends’ iTunes playlists; and from within iTunes you can send songs to your friends or post songs to your profile.

IF: How do you wish the Facebook platform could be improved?

AP: I think the platform is pretty fantastic already! Of course there will always be little things that can be tweaked, and we’re bugging the Facebook guys every day with little requests. But on the whole, I give the platform an A+. It’s outstanding on every level: brilliant strategy, very well-designed, almost flawless implementation. I just hope they can buy servers fast enough to keep up with the demand!

[tags]facebook,ilike,app,apps,platform,viral[/tags]

Facebook has always been known for its clean, minimal look, and the fact that it does not allow users to spice up their stylesheets with their own colors or themes (a sometimes-praised, oft-lamented feature of Myspace, since it leads to many garish and hideous creations). The advent of the Facebook app platform has allowed for a much greater customizability of the user profile, but the overall look and feel remains guarded by Facebook. In fact, Facebook does their best to handicap style options on the part of app developers, and rewrites all style declarations so that they affect only the space occupied by the app itself.

Today, some clever (and humorous) hackers have found a way around this restriction, and have created an app which lets you style your page as a whole. This is almost certainly going to be banned by Facebook, if it hasn’t already by the time of posting, so experiment with it while you can. I successfully made my page ugly by turning the whole background a dull grey, but the possibilities for horror are endless, as evidenced by the screenshot below. The app is tongue-in-cheekily called I CAN HAS A MYSPACE PLZ and was clearly made for a few laughs at the expense of some hole found in Facebook’s style-protection system. The app is designed to “bring the opportunity for eyebleeding self-expression from the Murdoch Empire to the (formerly) clean, cool land of Facebook.”

It does that. To dubious effect. Here are a few examples:

Facebook seems already very invested in controlling its look, so it will be interesting to see how it responds to apps like this.

UPDATE: As expected, Facebook has removed this app, and I received this word on the app from the developer: “It took advantage of a loophole in Facebook that allowed random code to be executed. Obviously I chose to use it for a non-malicious purpose, and was planning on letting Facebook know this morning about the loophole. My account has just been disabled, which is disappointing and I do hope it gets re-enabled soon as I have many (much, more legitimate) project ideas on the way for the Facebook Platform.”
[tags]facebook,apps,myspace,css,style[/tags]

The Facebook application directory, which supposedly keeps track of the “Newest” apps as well as the most popular, has not been appreciably updated in a while. A visit to an IRC channel for Facebook app developers gives one the impression of an all-out, 24-hour hackathon, everyone working feverishly to push their next app live. And a number of these applications have been successfully, if quietly, gathering traction in pockets of the social network. One simple friend-tagging app, Favorite Peeps, has over 92,000 users, which would put it in the top 20 of the “Most Users” category if it were in the directory.

Perhaps the onslaught of new apps has caught Facebook approval management by surprise, forcing them to hold back new apps which are obviously popular, and have even been around long enough to garner quite a few users. It’s unclear; but one thing that is clear is that the home-brewed app flood is on its way. And, since the official app directory hasn’t been quick enough on the uptake to handle this flood, some practical developer used the platform to create his own list of apps:

It’s called New Apps, and it has allowed new developers to submit apps without an approval delay. There are enough apps in this unofficial directory to give us an indication of what the coming weeks might hold in terms of new products.

For the most part, there’s a sense that people are trying to do anything that someone else hasn’t done yet. So the experimentation has ranged from the philosophical (here’s one app that rather self-consciously does nothing, and another that simply echoes what it hears, in proprietary Facebook-code) to the absurd.

However, most users probably don’t want a picture of a cat in a sandwich on their profile, and so the majority of these fledgling apps are efforts to port functionality found in extra-Facebook web services to Facebook itself (like stock tickers, forums, RSS feed display, to-do lists, wiki pages, sports schedules, and of course weather), or new/different/tweaked versions of existing apps, like my own Books app. Music tracking in particular seems to be well-plowed ground, with a number of Last.fm-powered apps (my personal favorite is Last.fm Plus–but stay tuned for our Music Tracker Battle Royale article in the near future).

Few of the ones I’ve seen are serious contenders for network-wide adoption, but given the excitement surrounding new ideas for apps in the development community, it’s only a matter of time before these newcomers hit on a few things that just click. And then, the brilliantly viral pathways of Facebook will be the best marketing any app ever had.

[tags]facebook,new,developers,app,applications[/tags]

Dogster, the social network for dogs, now has a Facebook app, Dogster: Cute. Right now, it’s pretty simple – basically HotOrNot for dogs. You vote on which dogs are the cutest by “giving them a bone”, and the cutest dogs show up on your profile page.

[tags]facebook,dogster,cute,pets,dogs,app,applications,bone[/tags]